


Hypnagogia

by kali_asleep



Series: Upon The Midnight [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dream AU, Language, M/M, Magic, Supernatural - Freeform, dream - Freeform, kind of., sherlock preys on john, upon the midnight
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-04
Updated: 2013-03-04
Packaged: 2017-12-04 06:17:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/707480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kali_asleep/pseuds/kali_asleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(A chaptered re-working of my contest one-shot, Upon the Midnight)</p><p>A series of increasingly surreal nightmares lead John to this discovery: succubae are real, and manipulate dreams for their own benefit.</p><p>Sherlock is, quite literally, the man of John's dreams. John is not altogether thrilled about the dream eater who has taken up residence in his head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hullo all!
> 
> Hopefully many of you discovered this work because you previously read my entry for the fyjff supernatural contest last October, Upon the Midnight. Many of my readers asked that I continue writing for this universe, and after just about a bajillion years, I have! For those of you that have read Upon the Midnight, you'll find that the first chapter is nearly identical to the first half of that work (with a few minor additions). However, after the first chapter I've changed quite a bit: since I'd hoped to pace the whole thing differently and pick up on the plot line alluded to in my original work, things are pretty different from the second chapter on. 
> 
> All-in-all, there will be 3 parts to this series: Upon the Midnight (the original and unchanged oneshot), Hypnagogia (the main, multi-chaptered story), and a third, as of yet unnamed oneshot (poooooooooorn). Many thanks to everyone who encouraged me to take on this project - I hope you all enjoy! As always, my eternal love goes quinnanderson, my best friend and awesome beta/britpick-er/baus.
> 
> As always, I don't own Sherlock or any associated works but my own. Ta!

The streetlights cast a harsh, clinical white light on the dirt road down which John stumped. Despite the blackness of the sky overhead the ramshackle houses with their knotty lawns were set in garish relief as John peered at them; shadows cast by fences and mailboxes stretched out towards the homes and carved leering faces across their worn vinyl fronts. John stopped as he came to the front of one. The cracks in the empty driveway mapped an erratic path between him and the front door. He began to follow them, stepping carefully along them. Under the glare of the too-bright streetlights the door was blood red. He paused. Blood red.

 

But no, no, the door had been russet when he was a child—the colour of his mother’s hair, dyed to scare away the grey.

 

Abruptly John turned on his heel, staring out into the street. It was devoid of any cars, people, or animals, but there was no mistaking that it was the road he had grown up on. But no, wait, just moments before, John had been walking the streets of London, had turned down an alley he knew as a shortcut to Bart’s—he’d been rushing to get to an exam—

but he was already a doctor, he was done with his exams—

 

Mystified, John whirled around to again face his old home. His mother had thrown the door wide open and was screaming at him, a single finger pointing to his chest. He couldn’t hear her though, couldn’t tell what she was saying, could only see the horror that surfaced in her widening eyes as she continued to shout. The silence was suddenly overwhelming: it drowned out the bang of his heart and the pull of his breath and transformed into a low ring that uncurled in his ears and steadily grew louder. He was disoriented. John turned to the street again. A figure stood beyond the shocks of light cast from the lamps. John could see no more than an outline: tall, impossibly slim, completely dark. He glanced back at his mother. She had been blanched by the light, and had lowered her ghostlike hand. Opening his mouth to speak, John took a step towards her. Her lips—a faint line of pale pink—pressed firmly together and her eyes narrowed. John took another step. She raised her hand again and curled her fingers into the facsimile of a gun. Pulled the trigger.

 

His head cracked against the concrete. The ringing got louder, rushed into his ears like a tidal wave of electrostatic discharge. He was vaguely aware of blood—vibrant, front-door red—pulsing out from his chest and bubbling into the cracks in the driveway. John’s eyes rolled back, and as they did he saw for a split-second the dark figure from before, now standing in the middle of the road. Despite how the white light pounded down, the figure remained as black as ever.

 

In the moment before he died, John swore he heard it whisper.

 

~

 

_Boring_.

 

~

 

Convulsing, John pulled his eyes open. For the measure of a few loud heartbeats he was paralyzed, unable to move under the incredible pressure on his bare chest. The skin around his scar seemed to twitch painfully, causing the dull ache near his shoulder to intensify into a single point of nauseating pain. Pumping desperately, his heart urged him to action.

 

John abruptly hauled himself out of his sweat-damp bed. Underneath his feet the linoleum floor of his little one-room flat was cool and slightly sticky. Familiar. Reaching for the cane he usually kept propped up by the nightstand, he cursed as he saw its dim outline on the other side of the room—he must have batted it away in his sleep. Limping slowly, John made his way to the toilet and switched on the light. The light from the uncovered bulb was harsh on his eyes—John thought of a familiar street, the colour of blood under fluorescents.

 

“Just a dream, Watson,” he muttered, staring at the sagging, sallow face in the mirror.

 

For the rest of the night John huddled at the edge of his bed, mind replaying the words to the pace of his pounding heart.

 

_Just-a-dream-just-a-dream-just-a-dream-just-a-dream…_

~

 

For a week, the dreams continued. One night Harry drowned face-down in a pool of her own vomit while John watched on, helpless, his fumbling hands never seeming quick or coordinated enough to reach out and turn her over. Another night the Humvee John was driving down a crowded street in Afghanistan spun out of control, skidding over thick oil that seemed to ooze out from the mouths of the local women. That same night he dreamt again, twice, maybe two hundred times, though all he remembered was staring up into his own sun-worn face while blood escaped around a hunk of shrapnel lodged in his gut. Past his sister, and the women, and his reflected look of terror though waited the figure: dark and gaunt against the white walls or red sand that rose up in his dreams. At first, John only saw the shape in the split second before everything in the dream went to hell; after spotting the harbinger of disaster, John would have just enough time to feel his stomach wrench and then the whole world would fall apart at his hands.

 

The longer the dreams went on, though, the more he began to notice. A soldier on instinct, John began to scan the landscape of his nightmares as if they were enemy territory, and soon enough he saw the looming silhouette at every point in his dreams. No matter the lighting or time of day in the dream the figure was always umbra black, always close enough to observe but never close enough to truly see. It wavered endlessly on the peripheral.

 

Frankly, John was sick of it.

 

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

 

John was yelling. He wasn’t quite sure if he’d just slid into his first dream, or if perhaps he’d been dreaming already for hours on end, but the words nonetheless scraped past his dry throat and echoed across the darkened desert of the newest scene. With a terse grunt John pushed himself off his knees, letting the Afghani boy with the crushed ribs and the eerie, eyeless face roll out of his arms. On unsteady feet he spun around to where he knew the figure would be; as soon as John came even with its black form the boy behind him began to choke out plaintive cries.

 

“No, no you don’t, you bastard.”

 

He didn’t turn around. Instead, John shrugged off the heavy med pack he’d somehow found himself carrying and made his way across the sand to where the figure stood.

 

The dark shape wavered like a distorted picture on a bad VHS, then suddenly flickered away and reappeared further off from where it had stood before. John cursed under his breath but did not stop; sand kicked up behind him as he began to run. The figure flickered in and out again and again the closer John got.

 

“Fuck you,” he huffed, slowing to a stop. “This is my head, I make the calls.” Running a hand through hair, John squinted in the direction of the shape.

 

Sand lurched underneath him and suddenly John was taking a slow step forward. Without quite remembering how he had closed the distance between himself and the figure. It began to flicker once more.

 

“No,” he snapped, voice carrying the command of his days as a captain. The black body stayed firmly in place, and John slowly reached out to it. Even at less than four feet away, the features of the figure were still indistinct, dark and vaguely humanoid.

 

A strange sound slithered over his ears as his hand came within inches of the shape: the sound of rainwater sliding over cobblestone; the impossible sound of a cat slinking through a thick fog; a low, smooth sound that John belatedly registered as a voice.

 

_Trust issues… never fully comfortable unless struggling to regain control through brutish methods…_

 

“Hey, sod off!”

 

The semi-speaking stopped and the black figure’s head snapped to the side. Before John could react, one of the figure’s arms darted toward him and _pushed_.

 

~

 

“Oh hell.”

 

John met his own glare in the scummy reflection of the mirror. He was tired, that much was certain, the little red capillaries crackling around his irises revealing his nights of restless sleep.

It wasn’t his haggard face, though, that had drawn such a reaction from the doctor. No, instead, it was the welt rising along his collarbone, the sting of which he’d only noticed while scrubbing down in the shower. He brought one slightly shaking hand up to cover the bruise. Between the purpling swells and the reddish looking marks that criss-crossed his collarbone, it looked to John that he’d tried to both claw at his skin and restrain himself simultaneously.

 

Except for the fact that the mark itself, undeniably shaped like an open hand, was made by fingers longer and slimmer than his own.

 

~

 

The dream took no time in escalating. John came into it running a dim stretch London street, surrounded by the men from his old company. Ahead he could see where his superior had stopped and shoved the barrel of his rifle into the mouth of a kneeling child. John stumbled to a halt and veered to his left, coming eye to almost eye with the faceless figure.

 

_Sense of morality predicates he turn on his men to stop the harming of innocents, but his unerring loyalty makes him hesitate…_

The figure was speaking again, though John saw no mouth to move. It seemed not to have noticed John’s sudden turn to it.

 

“No, what’s making me hesitate is that fact that I’ve definitely gone off the deep end and am being insulted by some bloody figment of my imagination in my own sodding dream! Is this just some game to you?”

 

_Oh-_

 

The streets of London fell away and were replaced by a thick fog. Though he had been only feet away the figure vanished. With a huff John reached out to where it had been. Nothing. John took a few shuffling steps, blindly moving through the mist. The white wall pressed in around him, its shifting shapes making him dizzy.

 

_Obvious that another distraction is necessary. It seems as though the soldier’s survival instinct is too heavily influencing…_

Of course. John rolled his eyes and turned so that he was walking in the direction of the voice. The voice grew louder as he picked up his pace; it seemed as though the figure had become too distracted with his own plotting to continue running.

 

John took a resolute step forward and stepped into a clearing. It was as though he’d walked out of one room and into another; when he turned back though, all he saw was an endless expanse of white floor. The voice was muttering now, words indecipherable.

 

“Do you ever shut up?” John asked as he faced the figure.

 

Jutting cheekbones and a piercing stare filled the face of the man who glared back at him. Without knowing, John knew that this was his figure, the shadowy shape who had tormented his dreams for over a week. Had John not been so livid, he might have noticed the unearthly translucence of the man’s skin, or the way the air around his unruly dark curls writhed and shimmered like a heat wave. He did not notice the birdlike lightness of the man’s wrist as John snatched it in a tight grip and pulled away at his own shirt, nor did he notice the slight point of the other man’s teeth when his mouth opened to protest.

 

What John did notice, however, was that the stranger’s outstretched hand, forced onto John’s collarbone, matched perfectly the mark left there. With a noise of disgust John threw the man’s hand away from him.

 

“That _hurt_ , you arse,” John grit out. The stranger’s jaw dropped slightly, then closed with a perfunctory snap.

 

“Perhaps if you hadn’t been so foolishly insistent on pursuing me, you would have avoided the injury.” The man’s voice was the same as he’d heard before, if not sharper.

 

“And let you keep messing with my dreams? I might have been stupid enough to create you, but I’m not dumb enough to let you keep going.”

 

“Create _me_?” The man ran a hand through his hair and let out an ugly snort. “I think you’ve validated your idiocy, John.”

 

John spun around, raising his hands in exasperation. “That’s it, I’ve gone crazy!”

 

“No, I guarantee you that you’re only afflicted with stupidity. I’m just as real as you are.”

 

“Says the dream man in the dream world.” John felt ready to tear out his hair in frustration; the other man was already trying to, both hands now cording angrily through black curls.

 

“Dream man—incredibly original. If I were a figment of your sleeping mind, then how can you explain the existence of the mark?” The man sprung into motion, grabbing John by the wrist and spreading out his hand.

 

“You’ve got the hands of a soldier: even though you’ve been back in London for months, the callousing on the skin between your thumb and forefinger are evidence of prolonged holding of a gun. Your fingers are slightly shorter than average for an adult human male, but you made up for it in surgery with incredibly steadiness—until the shooting, of course.” The man extended his other hand and pressed it against John’s. His pale fingers rose over the top of John’s.

 

“There’s no way you could have made a bruise like that with your own hands,” he said. John pulled his hand out of the stranger’s grip and cursed under his breath.

 

“Who _are_ you then?”

 

“Sherlock,” he said, as if that explained everything.

 

“Bless you,” John muttered. “Yea, there’s no way my mind would come up with a name that posh.”

 

“It’s a family name!” Sherlock exclaimed, looking scandalised.

 

“All right, you’re real—and a wanker at that—but you’re not human?”

 

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Obviously.”

 

“So…?”

 

Sherlock began to pace, the click of his expensive-looking dress shoes echoing through the surrounding nothingness. “Do I really have to spell everything out for you? I’m a dream eater.”

 

“Uh huh. And?” John folded his arms over his chest, hoping to hide his bewilderment with nonchalance. It riled Sherlock even more.

 

“A dream eater: living night terror, sleep-demon, night hag! I’m a psychic parasite who lives off of the energy of the sleeping human mind. You’ve likely heard of the most vulgar approximation of what my kind are: succubae-”

 

“You mean you give people nightmares and then shag them in their sleep—God, have you been shagging _me_ in my sleep?” John took a step back from the other man, feeling strangely tense.

 

“Of course not!” Sherlock snapped, stepping in very close to John, looming over him. “I’ve done extensive research and found that the fuel produced by sheer human terror is infinitely more… _satisfying_.” The feral grin that stretched across his face as Sherlock noticed John flinch made John uncomfortable: for the first time, John noticed the point of his teeth. “Though there are a few of our kind who continue to subsist off of sexual energy—The Woman is particularly infamous for her feasts.”

 

Annoyance flickered over Sherlock’s face as he paused in thought. Recognizing an escape, John took a few steps back and began to turn slowly.

 

“So we’re in my head, and you’re feeding off of me?”

 

“I _was_ feeding off of you, but since you’re no longer frightened you’re no longer giving off energy. In fact it’s really become rather bothersome—trying to keep you occupied has taken up valuable amounts of brain power that could have otherwise been working on my most recent experiment.”

 

“Oh, sorry to interrupt your meal! I’ll just go on back to letting you mess with my dreams and driving me half-insane.”

 

“If you would be so kind—”

 

“If you’d be so kind as to get out of my head!” John shouted, balling his hands into fists.

 

The other man’s eyes narrowed, darkening as his entire face contorted. “Absolutely not.”

 

John’s jaw dropped, his face reddening with indignation. “Excuse me?” His clipped voice held all of the muted rage of a captain.

 

“I. Said. No.” Sherlock’s voice oozed with defiance. “I will not be leaving until absolutely necessary.”

 

John opened his mouth to respond, but was suddenly drowned out by the wailing of an alarm. In front of him, Sherlock’s entire form began to flicker. The room splintered around him, black cracks cutting into the white. Sherlock’s features melted away; he was the figure once more.

 

_Out of time_ , he rumbled.

 

~

 

John woke up mid-gasp. The grating buzz of his alarm continued for minutes as he sat in bed, hands pressed over his eyes.

 

~

 

“Alright there, John?”

 

The doctor looked up from the murk of his coffee cup. He sighed and smiled at the mousy woman standing above him.

 

“Fine, Molly, just tired. Haven’t been sleeping well. Sit?”

 

“Ta.” The pathologist sat down, setting her lunch tray at the table with a heavy clunk. “Is it the PTSD?” she asked, forehead wrinkling.

 

Molly, with her soft brown eyes, had a sharp perception and quiet, straightforward approach to people. Of everyone John had met or reunited with since his return from Afghanistan, she was the only who treated him as if he was made of something other than glass. He supposed it made sense: they’d met when John had brought his class of med students training for the field to the morgue to study bullet wounds. Molly’s untempered (if not mildly disconcerting) admiration of John’s approach to fatal lesions had culminated in a rather blunt sort of friendship. John glanced up again to see her waiting face.

 

“Nah. Well, maybe. Nightmares, mostly—some from the war, some just completely…” John trailed off and stared back down into his coffee. The liquid swirled languidly, and John was reminded of a head of black, curled hair. “Bizarre,” he finished. “They’ve been going on all week, night after night.”

 

Molly nodded and picked at her food. “I’m sure they’ll quit soon. You know, those things seem to run in cycles.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Phrasing, John.” Sherlock’s smirk became a rather wicked smile. “And as it is, I’m no man. Now, if you’re going to insist on following me, try not to be boring and do try to keep up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whooooo! New content, finally <3 I've decided to post the first two chapters all at once, as the first one is kind of old hat anyway. 
> 
> This is un-edited and un-brit-pick'd; as such, any and all mistakes are mine to own (unlike Sherlock or anything in the canon Sherlock universe). Enjoy!
> 
> Edit: Formatting is a pain (sorry if this looks awful)

“Still around, I see!”

 

If John’s chipper tone and sudden appearance took the dream eater by surprise, he hardly showed it. Moments before, John had rather brazenly stepped through an intricately detailed replication of the quilt from his childhood bedroom. While the shift in state from walking horizontally (through the wall of fog he first encountered) to walking vertically (up through the bed) had been disorienting, John had righted himself and approached without the other man’s noticing. He briefly glanced back to see a John-sized hole breaching the bed.

 

“Observant as ever,” Sherlock drawled, unmoving from his place on the ceiling. If ever an entire range of emotions could be drawn from the set of a pair of shoulders, it was now: Sherlock’s back, studiously turned to the intruder, was ramrod straight with tension and his shoulders lifted high (or low, really, given his upside-down position) with what was either wariness or anticipation. Ignoring this, John took a few steps around the dream-replica of his childhood bedroom. For a few moments he sized up a faded poster of a curvy woman bursting out of a bikini.

 

“You know, I never had any nudes up in my room,” he said conversationally. “Mum wouldn’t allow it.”

 

As soon as the words left his mouth the image on the poster melted away, replaced with an aerial shot of Stonehenge that John distinctly remembered.

 

“Irrelevant,” Sherlock muttered, back still to John.

 

“Sloppy,” he countered. “Unless you were setting me up for some awful wank-shame dream.” John crossed over to the door and turned the handle. “What, is Harry about to walk in?” John asked, smirking as Sherlock’s shoulders twitched.

 

“You know, even before I was in the military I kept habits like a soldier. Didn’t matter if I was in a hurry; I wouldn’t have left the door unlocked.” The lock clicked as it slid in place. Finally, Sherlock turned to John. The space around the other man began to fizzle, streaks of white breaking up John’s room—entire memories breaking into bits of static. The white noise spread from Sherlock and quickly erased the room: they once again stood in the supposed center of nothing.

 

“Cute,” John said. He stared into Sherlock’s impassive face and smiled icily. “Are you quite done now?”

 

The dream eater returned his gaze with one infinitely more frigid. Sherlock sprung into motion, circling John with long strides. His shoulders hunched upwards and his pale eyes grew dark, beady.

 

“You’ve come here to demand something—obvious—but your antiquated need to establish a rapport before making a request insists that you muddle around with small talk first. Must be big then. Not some sort of brilliant revelation; I would have seen that already. No, you’d planned this even before you’d gone to sleep, which means you’ve been thinking about it in the waking world—abnormal, you know, to remember a dream eater outside of sleep. Clearly then, you’re about to forcefully request that I leave this cramped little skull of yours, please and thank you. I’ll save you the mental effort then: No.”

 

The jarring tumble of sound that came out of Sherlock’s mouth was more squawk than sentence; with each phrase Sherlock seemed to pierce deep into John’s mind and tease out the choicest bits of thought. Nonetheless, John couldn’t help but allow his smile to widen as the scavenger pecked through him. He raised a hand to the back of his head, the very figure of chuffed chagrin.

 

“Wow, that trick of yours—”

 

“It’s hardly a trick, John. You see—”

 

“It’s good, really good. But I didn’t come here to make you leave.”

 

Mid-sentence, Sherlock froze. His lips parted to speak again, but John cut him short.

 

“Not that I’m against a show of force to get my way—did invade an entire country and all—but there are a couple of considerations that have made me rethink the whole situation.” John began to count off on his fingers.

 

“One: you’re in my head and clearly crazier than I am, which means arguing you out would be a miserable process.”

 

Sherlock, who had restarted his revolutions around John when the other man began to speak, looked as if her were about to interrupt again.

 

“Ah-ah-ah, let me finish. Where was I?” John paused momentarily, tapping a finger across his lips as he pretended to think. “Oh, yes. Two: you continue to use the word ‘parasite’ to describe yourself. Now, this tells me that there’s a chance you’re well and good wedged into my head somehow, and trying to force you out could damage me somehow. I’m not willing to find out. Doctor, remember?” Sherlock did not try to respond, but John did find himself incredibly impressed at the force of Sherlock’s eye roll.

 

“Three: I wager that now that I know you exist, you can’t really do much to me other than talk too quickly in my general direction or ignore me” With these words a sly grin rose on John’s face. “Your scare tactics don’t work on me anymore, so your options are to stay and starve from sheer boredom, or leave.”

The circle Sherlock paced around John grew tighter; abruptly he stopped and swooped in close. Becoming used to the tactic, John took a smooth step back instantly.

 

“You forget that there are other ways of feeding,” Sherlock said, a look of annoyance at John’s small escape quickly replaced with something much heavier. “I could, as you put it, start _shagging_ it out of you.”

 

_Thank whatever for the lack of dream hearts and dream capillaries_ , John thought, a blush decidedly _not_ rising on his face. The pointed smirk on Sherlock’s face nonetheless revealed that he had been caught.

 

“Yea, sure, and you forget that I am trained in over sixty ways to kill a man. Your skinny arse would be mine.” The air was suddenly filled with a silent thrum, the pulse of a motor too low to be heard, only felt. John jerked around to find the source of the noise, but saw only Sherlock.

 

“Phrasing, John.” Sherlock’s smirk became a rather wicked smile. “And as it is, I’m no man. Now, if you’re going to insist on following me, try not to be boring and do try to keep up.”

 

And with that, in the middle of the white space-that-was-once-John’s-bedroom, Sherlock ducked down past the open door of a waiting cab. John, taking in the noiseless black auto, rolled his eyes and followed suite.

 

~

 

It was excellent. The entire thing was brilliant in a way that caused John’s head to twinge painfully when he thought on it for too long. Instead of questioning too hard, he gave into the illusion (or delusion? he wondered) that was Sherlock’s London: a dream of light and angle that made John feel as though he were looking through the viewfinder of a just-too-focused camera. More luminescent than radiant, Sherlock’s London was a pastiche of steel and neon populated only by the phantom-thin outline of dark cabs. John had seen no people other than himself and Sherlock (if that even _counted_ ), the driver of the cab being no more than a slightly substantial shadow.

 

Dragging his eyes from the window (he had _technically_ seen this all before), John turned to take in Sherlock. The man seemed to be looking beyond the passing London scene; it seemed to John as if Sherlock’s gaze was piercing, needle-like, through the fabrication of John’s dream and examining the very threads that composed it. It made _John_ wonder just what these dreams were made of.

 

“Either ask the question or stop thinking so loudly,” Sherlock muttered, his stare shifting fractionally. “It’s distracting.”

 

John was so startled by the sudden break in silence that his mouth rolled out the question before his mind could provide any snark. “Why London?”

 

Sherlock snorted, still looking out the window.

“I’m a supernatural being that thrives on the dreams of humans, John. With such a significant and diverse population, where else would you expect to find something like me?

Marlborough? Northumberland?”

 

John shook his head. “No, but really, why London?”

 

Sherlock’s eyes were _blue_ and very much fixated on John. They flitted for a moment in surprise before narrowing into something that could only be called _approval_. A moment passed before Sherlock spoke again.

 

“London is an old city. Old enough to be considered so even by the most ancient of fey. Old enough not to be _boring_.

 

“That _would_ be why,” John muttered. Still, when Sherlock spoke of London it seemed as though his entire frame came to life, his eerie stillness suddenly electrified. “So you’ve been in London long?”

 

“My entire life.”

 

There was a flickering in John’s peripheral vision. He turned back to the window. London cut in and out, flashing by like movie frames on a sluggish reel. With each burst of light John saw the city reborn into antiquity: a split second of endless grass and huts clustered around the Thames; the graceless rise of timber-beamed homes; the Globe, roof open to the night; the whole of London crackling as it burned; London burning, again, backlit by blitzkrieg bombs.

 

John looked back to Sherlock, who smugly grinned at the wonder on John’s face.

 

“There’s no way you’ve been around that long.”

 

Sherlock’s laughter startled him.

 

“No, I’m not quite that old. But it can be surprising the things that can get stuck in your funny little heads.”

 

~

 

“Molly?”

 

“Yea, John?”

 

John hesitated at the door of Molly’s pristine pathology lab just long enough for her to notice. She pulled away from the microscope, one hand still at a dial she had been adjusting.

 

“Have you ever… made up someone in a dream? Like a stranger, not someone you know?”

 

Soft eyes flicked upwards as Molly thought. Her look briefly grew distant, then snapped back to focus even as a faint blush rose on her cheeks.

 

“Well, you know, I’ve had dreams where, um… _you know_ ,” Molly nearly stuttered over the last words, “but they always kind of looked like someone I knew—a patient or a celebrity or maybe someone I saw on the tube that morning. Still having those bad dreams?”

 

Her gaze settled on John’s face, and he could only wonder what she saw that made her brow furrow so pointedly.

 

“Sort of. Well. Yea. Not quite, just—” Now it was John’s turn to stutter. He knew exactly what kind of dreams Molly had been thinking of, and John would be damned if he started thinking of them as well. Somehow, Sherlock would know. If Sherlock were real, if—

 

“You might just have too much going on, what with work and the new flat and all. We both know you spend more time than you should at the hospital. Take some time off, for once.”

 

Instead of agreeing, John could only laugh: Molly’s own face was haggard from the late nights he knew she pulled in the morgue. Molly shot him a mock scowl. “I know, I know,” she huffed.

 

“How about this? I’ll agree to take some time off for myself the minute you take time for yourself. Then, we can both go down to the pub and commiserate over how we’ve got nothing better to do than be at work and talk about work.”

 

The high laugh that filled the lab released the unknown tension that had nested between John’s shoulders. Joining her own, his laughter seemed heavy in contrast—but it was a laugh, nonetheless.

 

“You’ve got a deal and a date, Doctor Watson,” she said, smiling.

 

Angling herself back towards the microscope, Molly gave John a quick wink and a wave. For a heartbeat John couldn’t help but think that he wouldn’t mind seeing _her_ in a dream for once. He pushed away from her door and turned back into the hall. Like a floodlight triggered by motion John’s thoughts suddenly flipped to the dreams he _was_ having: those involving pale skin and a pair of feral eyes. Sherlock, if he was in there, if he really was real, would probably have something to say about that (no doubt, as he had something to say about _everything_ ).

 

John walked blindly down the hallway, skirting IV racks and harried-looking med students. Awoken earlier than expected (car backfiring down the alley and a red burst behind his eyes a soldier’s broken alarm), John had come in early and spent the free time before his office hours perusing medical research on dreams. Many sources claimed that dreams were simply the brain’s visual filing system, a convenient way to aggregate the data of the day. All based on observations and thoughts, information collected consciously and unconsciously. Thus Molly’s familiar looking fantasy-men, or John’s Afghani nightmares. It was sound, it made sense.

 

But then there was Sherlock. That name. The dark, lush voice and precipitous jaw. Fey-primal. John could guarantee that he had never seen anything like _that_.

 

~

 

 


End file.
